But if you’re going to build a computer with used parts, the same depreciation would happen for the Steam Machine itself in a year or whatnot. The Steam Deck can be found used at this point. It doesn’t change what it costs when it’s new, and you have to make like for like comparisons if you’re going to call the price “absurd”; I mean, it is absurd, but we know exactly why, and there’s no getting around it.

And me personally, I know I have more means than most, but I never buy used, because I’m trying to make what I buy last, and used hardware introduces more variables into how many years I’m going to get out of it. I bought a graphics card during the crypto boom that caused a GPU shortage. The smarter thing would have been to wait, but we couldn’t predict the future and know how long it was going to last. Estimates at the time were similar to what we’re seeing right now with SSDs and memory, in that prices would stay high for another couple of years. In actuality, prices dropped less than a year later. I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time. Fortunately, other than this Steam Machine, I’m not in the market for a new computer right now.